Free as in beach?

So Java has been freed. Free as in speech, one is traditionally required to add, not as in lunch, as which there reputedly ain't no such thing.

But to the mobile phone vendors who have invested in Java code in their products, the idea of being thrown on the tender mercies of GPLv2 virality could feel like finding themselves naked in public. So Sun is offering them a blanket: keep your commercial license and ignore all that GPL stuff -- for now, anyway. The freeing of Java seems a little complicated, but one guesses that freedom is never free.

Meanwhile, balancing this headlong rush toward communism, Sun's blogging CEO issues the 1980s capitalist-sounding message that cache is king but rejects the 1990s meme that thin is in. Which reminds one of recent 1980s-retro-sounding pronouncements on the virtues of being filthy rich:

"[Filthy rich clients] are so graphically rich that they ooze cool, they suck the user in from the outset and hang onto the user with a death grip of excitement, they make the user tell their friends about the applications." -Chet Haase, Sun Microsystems.

Personally, I'm not attracted by the idea of being sucked into a death grip by something that oozes, but maybe that's just another of those 1980s things.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 05:02 PM  Permalink